Ferial Haffajee:TAKING STOCK
Walking up the stairs to the infamous 10th floor of the Johannesburg Central police station, one realises it will take much more than a change of name to cleanse the tortured space that was John Vorster Square.
The monolithic building hulks over the southern verges of the city, its police-blue exterior an apartheid landmark in a fast- changing city. Inside, its sad history is still palpable. As we approach the 10th floor, uneasiness grips me despite this being the new South Africa where police officers smile and offer a guided tour.
Not that I had been up here in the bad days. But the 10th floor was renowned. It was a place you didn’t want to get taken to. The stomping ground of the blue-eyed boys of the security branch. In the interrogation rooms, they broke many detainees. When they didn’t, they adopted other means. Like stringing them out of the window by their ankles to force a confession.
The 1970s activist Ahmed Timol probably fell to his death on the pavement below in such a fashion. I fight to banish the image from my mind and remind myself of the need to record change. So it is with the past stirring and niggling that the new 10th floor jolts me into the present.
Its cleansing has come in turquoise paint, which covers the once grey walls. Massive steel doors, built to secure fortress apartheid and to ensnare those who dared challenge it, are now painted an innocuous purple. Rendered impotent in purple, their new image is a symbol of this building’s atonement. Its painted windows have been scraped clean in a new commitment to transparency.
There are human acts of atonement too. Superintendent Chris Wilken heads public relations, which ironically sits on the formerly top-secret 10th floor. He is an old- timer at Johannesburg Central and a crack- hand from the old security branch who specialised in studying the former “terrorists” of the African National Congress, Pan Africanist Congress and Azanian People’s Organisation.
He is wiry with intelligent eyes that dart about the place. “I’m not worried about where I’ve come from. I’ve changed,” declares Wilken.
The 10th floor houses public relations, finance and logistics: new operations for a police force struggling to become a police service. First went the ranks of kragdadigheid (iron-fisted force). They were replaced with new community-friendly ranks like superintendent, constable and sergeant.
The challenge for the police in the new order has posed a conundrum. While it must become a service for those it was taught largely to repress (with all its connotations of the smiling friendly-bobby-on-the-beat), it must at the same time fight a crime wave uncorked by the freedoms of the new state. It is a wave which has spilled into the cities and town: organised, brutal and chilling, and the officers of Johannesburg Central are at its apex.
Says Wilken: “If you haven’t been a policeman in Johannesburg, you haven’t been a policeman!” A younger officer declares quietly: “Sometimes community-friendly is a bit too friendly,” for the criminals they must fight.
Captain Corry Koekemoer, who is the king of the new client service centre on the ground floor, embodies community policing. Friendly and open, he proudly shows off his new domain. “There was access control in the apartheid times. Now there’s just easy access,” he says showing the new doors that open onto the street.
There is an air of professionalism about the place: they talk about turnaround time, statistics and goals. The only hangover from the old days are the constant references to the “illegal aliens” they net every day.
Johannesburgers who have ever had to report a crime at the former John Vorster will remember a very different reception. Surly officers might keep you waiting for hours. When they did get round to taking your statement in laborious longhand, there was a strong sense that you were just reporting to get a case number to claim for insurance. The docket would never be processed for crime fighting.
You often had to mix with rapists, petty thieves and other human detritus brought in by the cops. The open corruption was a pain to behold. On a trip there just last year, I saw two obvious skelms, dripping with gold, being whisked past a long queue and ushered into a private room by two officers. “And we pay their salaries,” I remember thinking at the time, feeling the impotent rage of a disempowered public.
While Koekemoer is a jovial man, it doesn’t seem that this kind of nonsense would be tolerated today. Previously, senior officers like him were buried under masses of paper somewhere in the building. Now they supervise and manage their charges. The new centre provides for strict separation between victims of crime and perpetrators. Detectives are on hand to deal with serious matters so that criminal investigation can begin right away while dockets are immediately logged into a computer system and then put in a locked filing cabinet so that they cannot disappear.
Johannesburg Central is today one of the pockets of excellence designed by Meyer Kahn, the businessman brought in to sharpen the police service. One of the most impressive innovations is the criminal intelligence office run by Superintendent Dave Walkley.
Formerly a member of the security branch, he is proof that not all former security agents need go the way of Ferdi Barnard, convicted recently of murder but also implicated in diamond dealing, doing drugs and organised crime.
Walkley has to make sense of statistics, to spot criminal trends and to interrogate. A huge map in the office he shares with eight other intelligence officers is marked with bright colours to illustrate where the crimes that make this one of the world’s crime capitals are perpetrated.
They pore over the station’s dockets checking for similarities in crimes committed, brief detectives on crime patterns and usually provide enough information to secure convictions. Walkley has introduced other innovations like photographing all suspects with a digital camera and scanning the rogues gallery into a computer system. Their success book is bursting with details of arrests and convictions.
While it may not feel like it, statistics indicate that the crime count in Johannesburg is coming down … slowly. Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi says: “We’re overcoming the paucity of criminal intelligence. We inherited a police service with a very low skills base. [But] a number of indicators show that we are ticking toward improvement.”
With greater investment, the rate of improvement could be even better. But the police service is making do with less and at the Johannesburg flying squad, their numbers have been denuded from 45 officers to 22. The reduction is part of a concerted effort to bring more civilians to free up police officers to police, to get rid of the old guard and to cut costs.
That might explain why on a Friday night on Johannesburg’s mean streets there are only three squad cars available. Constable Rikus van den Bergh remarks: “In New York, there are 300 cars on the street. Can you believe it? I saw it on Carte Blanche the other night.”
Driving in another big city at about 195kph in one of the squad cars, three things go through my mind: a prayer that Sergeant Gerhard Meintjies is not one of the cops without a driver’s licence, that I feel confident with people I distrusted until recently and that I now understand where the term flying squad comes from.
In their fuel-injected Opel Kadett, we police the south of Johannesburg, screeching from one “scene” to the next. The citizen band radio crackles constantly. By midnight, the flying squad control room has logged more than 1 600 calls in six hours.
Duty officers are looking weary – it’s a busy night in a mad, bad city. We go from a dirt- poor flat where a drunk man has smashed his fist through a window, to a house that has been cleaned out when its occupants left for an hour.
“Another gun on the streets,” sighs Meintjies as he suggests a doctor be called to tranquillise the hysterical owner. Earlier Van den Bergh had driven the drunk man to his own house and patiently sat through being slobbered over by the grateful drunk. Community policing indeed.
We’re on our way to the scene of a shooting when a tyre is punctured. The spare is flat too and not one of the spanners in the boot fits the wheel. The flying squad members try to flag down passers-by and it becomes clear why Kahn is so big on fleet management.
As the state police sit, rendered powerless by the inefficiency of others, private security guards careen past to the scene. Then I learn it’s the third time that night they’ve been stuck. Several times that night we have to push start the car because somebody mistakenly filled it with diesel and messed with the fuel system.
It’s an uphill battle. The officers don’t complain openly because they are escorting the media around. But if you listen carefully, you learn they’re paid very little, that it’s bloody dangerous work and that change brings uncertainty.
Van den Bergh and Meintjies have heard there are moves afoot to strip police of their guns. “It’s like taking an accountant’s calculator away.” Says Van den Bergh: “I pray every night. I’ve got an 11-month-old daughter.” Many of their colleagues have been killed.
The bulletproof vests they wear proved useless in the face of the machine-gun fire sprayed at a car like theirs at a Hillbrow intersection. An officer was killed in that attack. They reel off the names of others who have died.
Later, when we know each other a little better, their frustration becomes more palpable. The constant public haranguing of the police obviously touches a raw nerve in a force that is trying hard to become a service and to make sense of a fast-changing world.
Van den Bergh relates a story of a “snobbish” woman driving a Mercedes who screamed “I’m paying your salary” at him. “I get really irritated at that.” I could see his point.